The 4400® Promises Broken Read Free

NTAC-Seven! Get down here and blow this shit clear! Over!”
    “Copy that, NTAC-Five. Over,”
replied the chopper pilot. Seconds later, the black helicopter swooped low ahead of Tom and Diana. Its rotors kicked up enough wind to clear away the dirty fog and pounded out enough noise to drown out the engine of their sportbike as Tom twisted the throttle fully open. On the other side of the now bifurcated West Seattle Bridge, the suspect was racing away toward the Harbor Island Marina.
    “NTAC-Seven,” Diana shouted into the radio, “suspect is at the marina! Repeat, suspect is at the marina! Put a light on him, but keep your distance! Over!”
    “We’ve got him, NTAC-Five,”
replied the chopper pilot. The helicopter’s harsh white searchlight beam zeroed in on the escaping suspect as he boarded a speedboat docked in a slip at the marina. The young man turned and glared upward into the beam. Then a focused ripple of distortionfollowed the light back to the helicopter—and shredded it in midair. It tumbled out of the sky, a firestorm of broken metal and burnt bodies.
    Tom swerved left and narrowly avoided getting pinned under the mangled aircraft as it slammed to the ground and rolled over a dozen cars in the marina’s parking lot behind him. One vehicle after another exploded into flames, turning the lot into a fiery automotive graveyard. Shrapnel pattered across the ground on either side of Tom and Diana as they raced out of the lot and down the ramp to the marina’s outer slip.
    The speedboat’s engine growled to life, and the suspect severed the mooring lines with a quick burst of his disruption power. Tom squeezed the brake handle, and the sport-bike skidded and fishtailed across the dock. Diana was off the bike before it stopped moving, her Glock already clearing leather as she shifted to her shooting stance.
    As the bike halted, she opened fire on the boat, which sliced its way through the dark water of the Duwamish. Tom drew his Glock and joined his partner’s futile barrage. Diana’s weapon clicked empty. Tom’s pistol ran out of ammo a second later.
    Then a white frost stilled the river’s churning surface, and the boat’s spreading wake stopped in mid-ripple. The icy change overtook the speedboat, which struggled for a moment through a thick slush, then came to a stop with a sharp crack of splintering fiberglass as the surface of the Duwamish froze solid for half a mile in every direction.
    The young man in the boat turned and looked back in alarm, then staggered backward and collapsed.
    Looking over his shoulder, Tom saw a pair of Jordan’s uniformed Promise City peace officers on the shore. One had his hand on the now frozen surface of the water. The other was still looking through the scope of her sniper rifle. Its wide muzzle had been modified to fire darts. Tom figured the darts must be loaded with the concentrated sedative and promicin-inhibitor that could render p-positive individuals unconscious and temporarily suppress their extrahuman abilities.
    Diana noted the peace officers and holstered her weapon. “I guess we ought to go say thank you,” she said, sounding not very enthused about the idea.
    “I guess,” Tom said. He holstered his Glock as they walked back across the dock to shore.
    In the two minutes it took Tom and Diana to walk over to the peace officers, reinforcements arrived. A platoon of NTAC strike forces, dozens of Seattle cops and Promise City peace officers, and six NTAC agents—led by both incarnations of their colleague Jed Garrity, whose two selves had come to be distinguished by the colors of their neckties, one red, the other blue—raced one another across the ice sheet, all vying to be the ones to make the arrest.
    The only people not in a hurry to reach the boat, it seemed, were Tom, Diana, and the two peace officers who were actually responsible for stopping the suspect’s escape.
    “Nice work,” Tom said with a friendly nod to the duo. “I’m Tom Baldwin,